My Work by Olga Ravn (tr. Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell)
Reviewed by Trahearne Falvey
The increasingly essential Lolli Editions introduced English language readers to the Danish writer Olga Ravn with the The Employees (2021, translated by Martin Aitken), a kind of anti-work-prose-poem-meets-science-fiction-page-turner that received nominations for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the inaugural Ursula K Le Guin Prize. That strange, slight and beautiful book — a masterpiece in concision — appears very different to Ravn’s latest My Work (translated by Sophie Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell): almost 400 fragmentary, freewheeling pages about motherhood and writing. However, the two texts share both a formal hybridity and a core thematic concern: work.
When Ravn’s protagonist Anna becomes a mother, she is overwhelmed by the sheer volume of labour required of her and by the difficulty of resuming her work as a writer. The narrative — insofar as there is one — consists of her efforts to assert her own space, time and autonomy amidst news-driven anxiety, her partner Aksel’s general uselessness, and the endless loads of laundry.
‘If Anna’s job is to bring children into the world,’ Ravn asks, ‘is her writing about her body and home not precisely workplace literature?’ Ravn’s work with the Danish publisher Gyldendaal was crucial in the recent resurgence of interest in the psychologically intense writing of Tove Ditlevsen, and My Work is simultaneously haunted and inspired by artists like Ditlevsen who have created alongside, or out of, motherhood (Mary Shelley, Itō Hiromi, Leonora Christina Ulfeld) and others, like Doris Lessing (from whose The Golden Notebook Ravn takes her protagonist’s name) who chose writing over children. It is also in dialogue with a Marxist-feminist tradition, including the Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, the poetry of Anne Boyer, and the theory of Sophie Lewis, which has developed the concept of reproductive labour to refer to capital’s dependence on women’s unpaid work: gestation, breast-feeding, cooking, cleaning, shopping, thinking about shopping. ‘I had to keep production going,’ Anna declares, concerning the breast-pump, ‘I work // my work // my work // it is beyond you.’
My Work explores how the entanglements of motherhood interfere with the normative tenets of prose fiction as well as life more generally. It is a hybrid mix of lyric poetry, diary entry, medical journal, playscript and memoir which blurs the lines of fiction and non-fiction because, Ravn argues, it has to be. The traditional novel cannot represent the experience of being a new mother, and a new mother cannot write a traditional novel. In one of the sections of simple, short lines of lyrics that thread throughout the book, Ravn writes:
‘The poem
must be
simple
in my hand
before he wakes’
These sections represent a possibility for writing whilst mothering — sitting up in the hospital bed, holding a sleeping child, breastfeeding, jotting down thoughts in the palm of a hand — but they also enable an intimacy between the reader and Anna, and between Anna and her child, which is otherwise interrupted by cold, clinical discourses: the impersonal notes of a midwife, the categorising language of a psychiatrist. Ravn evokes a bureaucratic medical system which at times is against the mother (or the mother experiences as being against her) and in the face of which the lyric ‘I’ is limited and vulnerable: ‘I wake up and anxiety is there / I wake up and I’m about to die.’
Which is to say that this is a book concerned with pain and not pleasure, including that of the reader. At times, the comedic, satirical edge Ravn displayed in The Employees is evident, including in a section advising new mothers that ‘Airing out frequently is also recommended, if doing so two to three times a day is not already part of your daily routine’, but, on the whole, Ravn’s drive to represent the minutiae of maternal life results in a feeling of claustrophobic drudgery which resists narrative structure. There are multiple beginnings and endings, a doubling of narrator and protagonist, and a lack of plot and drive — even the development of the child’s ageing is disrupted by the book’s logic of ‘child’s time’ which scrambles linearity. Ravn reflects on these formal choices throughout the book: she asks, for example, ‘is the story of domestic life, of the child’s first year, of housekeeping, a story driven by internal events? And therefore a narrative arc without any major dramatic climaxes?’, but this self-consciousness does little to aid a reader who might feel, as I did, that even a minor dramatic climax would be nice.
Nonetheless, My Work is an extraordinary book. As someone who has never known and will never know the experience of giving birth, I was immersed in the psychic trauma of childbirth and as well as its material realities: the Braxton Hicks contractions, the pelvic pain, the vaginal examinations, the torn labia, the eight hours of breast-feeding. It is a serious undertaking, a monstrous book, that in all its seriousness and monstrousness seems at times to get away from Ravn and lose shape altogether. She writes that it is a ‘dirty book, a misshapen book, a book cut wrong… A book that can save me. A book I write to survive’.
As necessary and difficult as childbirth itself, My Work marks an important engagement with the past and present of women’s writing, but unlike The Employees (which I recommended to everyone I spoke to) it is definately not a book for a mass readership. ‘Maybe I should imagine that Anne Boyer is my only reader…Maybe that will help,’ Ravn writes in a flash of humour. ‘Then she remembered Anne Boyer couldn’t read Danish.’ Thanks to Smith and Russell’s translation, Boyer and any Anglophone reader brave enough can submerge into Anna’s anxious mind, her maternal body that is always at work.